British Columbia-based poet Jake Kennedy is to be honoured on Tuesday evening with the bpNichol Chapbook Award for poetry.
Kennedy, who teaches in the English Department at Okanagan College, won for his chapbook, Hazard.
He will be honoured at a Toronto fundraiser planned to boost the prize pot for the annual prize, sponsored by the Phoenix Community Works Foundation, to $2,000 from $1,000.
"BpNichol is a poet that I revere, and so to be associated with his work and memory makes this a very special award for me," Kennedy said in a statement released Monday. He described his own poetry as "Nicholesque."
The award, established in 1984, was created by the noted Canadian poet bpNichol to encourage and inspire new Canadian poets.
Nichol, who died in 1988, wrote more than 22 books of poetry and prose and won the Governor General's Award for poetry in 1971 and the Three-Day Novel Award in 1982 for Still.
